For many business enterprises, it has become important to reach customers, vendors and employees through the Internet or other public network. Consequently, there is a large and growing number of web-based site development and management tools available to enterprises that want to create or improve a presence on the Internet. However, a number of problems are recurrent in such web development efforts and not adequately addressed by conventional web site development and management tools.
Web-based communication is different from mainframe and client-server arenas where many information services (IS) departments have most of their expertise. One difference is that HTTP, an underlying protocol of web communication, is both connectionless and stateless. This causes a problem for dynamic interactions with the user where a web system needs to be able to keep track of the user's state during a session involving multiple web interactions (e.g., web page requests). Without a way to manage state, between web transactions the system will have "forgotten" information about the user and the context of the session. This can be further complicated by the fact that in many large web systems the user does not interact with the same web server from transaction to transaction.